125 miles or so below the ground in northwest wyoming is a hot spot in the earth's uppper mantle. The hotspot causes big blobs of molten rock to percolate up, carrying with them tremendous amounts of heat that produces all sorts of interesting results at the surface, including geysers like Old Faithful and hot springs and their big colorful mats of hot water bacteria. One of those bacteria was discovered to have the interesting property of being able to reproduce short segments of DNA even at high temperatures, and in turn led to the practical application of "Polymerase Chain Reaction", the process that's now used to allow DNA testing with only minute traces of genetic material, like a pin-drop of blood or saliva.
When Yellowstone last erupted 630,000 years ago, it left behind an enormous crater of around 45 by 30 miles. The blast, roughly 2500 times larger than Mt. St Helens, was enough to kill everything in a 600 mile radius within days. Before that day, there were rhinocerous and sabre-tooth deer wandering around Nebraska; you can visit their remains fossilized in volcanic ash today.
The hot spot also causes the earth to bulge. (diagram). The floor of Yellowstone caldera heaves up and down like a bubbling pie crust several feet in a 50 to 100 year cycle. The bulging causes fractures to form in the North American plate, a big slab of rock that forms most of our continent and floats atop the gooey magma and hot rock of the earth's mantle, rubbing against other plates that form the various ocean floors and other nearby land masses. The fractures are responsible for the thousands of small earthquakes that occur in Yellowstone every year. We can tell by examining the trail of fractures that lead away from Yellowstone to the southwest that either the hotspot or the North American plate has been drifting. Further evidence exists in the form of a line of older, extinct calderas similar in size but older than Yellowstone, leading off to the southwest into Idaho. The youngest of these calderas are 1.3 and 2 million years (diagram), perhaps indicated a 700,000 year cycle, but the frequency appears to have fluctuated wildly over time.
There are powerful and unpredictable forces at work under the caldera. If you're a proponent of the 600 to 700 thousand year cycle theory, we could see our next caldera eruption as soon as today. Most geologists reckon, however, that an eruption would be preceded by all sorts of warnings like major bulging and earthquakes. These aren't happening now, so we're probably safe for at least 50 to 70 thousand years.
Reading about this in my copy of "Windows Into the Earth" by Yellowstone authority Robert Smith while staying in West Yellowstone caused me great frustration. I had trouble sleeping after I bought the book; strange dreams and anxiety plagued my last two nights there. T asked if I was nervous about an eruption, but that didn't seem to be the case. It'd be over for me before I knew it and at least I wouldn't have to worry about returning our illegal rental car.
The feeling I had was more a kind of frustration at knowing there are schemes afoot that you aren't allowed to participate in. The consequences of these schemes will affect everyone you know, but you're not allowed to know when they'll happen, or even if they've been scuttled and you'll spend your life waiting in vain for them. All plots tend toward death, Don Delillo often says. For every plot that keeps you waiting and stymied there are hundreds that will poke up through the surface nearby and bury you in ashes of a different sort, though. Plots inside the Earth have a funny way of excluding you using nothing more than a little patience, and your own, inevitable mortality. Yellowstone can wait longer than I can to blow up, and I'm limited to a life in the 0-100 degrees fahrenheit range that precludes any chance of going down and checking out the scene in the mantle.
Having missed my chance to perish in the greatest cataclysmic eruption in recorded history, we loaded up the car and headed back to Utah to visit the school at which I may persue a PhD. Somewhere in Idaho, we phoned up my buddy Damien to plead with him to fetch us at the airport the next morning. There was a grim vulcanologists tone in his voice; the company at which we are coworkers had suffered enormous layoffs days after we'd left for the honeymoon. Forces deep below the surface had produced some other manner of small scale calamity and, all the while, I'd been in the dark. As he listed off the names of folks whom I would no longer share my days (I'd been spared), the sky 30 miles south showed the dark edge of storm clouds just over the bend, but it looked to me like an ash cloud headed our way.
Our luck hadn't run out, though. Our visit with my friend David Wiley and his family was uplifting, as his kids don't have any time for melancholy houseguests; they had important business in coloring books and on the computer to show us. David told me about the latest developments in his field and about a paper that he'd listed me, to my delight, as a co-author on following a hairbrained academic talk we had while stuck in traffic in Boston when I took an ill-advised route to get him to the airport following a conference here. Our hotel there was nice and it would have taken at least several days for lava flows to reach it from Wyoming. The rental folks asked no questions and we told no lies, and soon we were suffering through "Like Mike" on flight 1776.
Who'd have thought a year later I'd be on a plane but worried mostly about volcanoes?
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Sunday, October 27, 2002
This is a long installment, and not particularly entertaining, but I felt I should commit it all so that we'll be able to use this post as a reference when we're old and keep forgetting the details of our honeymoon. Also there are some places where I'm going to insert pictures, but T hasn't scanned them yet, so they'll appear as weird comments that seem to be leading to a photograph, but don't. You might skim through the middle and read about the horse, which was pretty funny. I guess the balloon is pretty good too. Hell, read it all.
Monday before last Mrs. Bailey and I ordered a Green Cab over to Logan, to catch our flight out to Salt Lake to begin the first leg of our wild-west honeymoon. Well, as wild as the shoulder season at Jackson Hole and Yellowstone can be. Green Cab is the only way to fly in Somerville, every driver will remind you in some way of your grandfather or great uncle jerry and the cars tend to be less ramshackle than most of the other outfits who've taxied me.
Logan has developed a clever technique for confusing would-be terrorists by randomizing the means allotted for check in. This day we chose the little computer check-in kiosk (with bag check, even!), despite the modest line at the human check-in counter. After negotiating a dozen screens requesting information, it asked us for a confirmation number. Confirmation verification screens, I believe, are the result of contract programmers who had trouble doing left outer joins or something and found it easier to just prompt the user, intentionally ignoring the knowledge that it would set off those travelers prone to arm-waving fits of frustration.
Stymied, we returned to the human check-in counter line, where I sulked about not having written down the number. T asked if perhaps the agent assigned to the computer check in spots could give us the confirmation number, and I lectured her about the necessity of multiple forms of verification, and how agents were forbidden from giving out bits of personal information at the counter. Then T went over and asked, and around 2 minutes later we were checked with boarding passes in hand. I am not completely oblivious to these lessons but I am definitely learning too slowly.
Upon arrival at Salt Lake, we headed over to the rental car counter, where I discovered that I had forgotten which of the companies I had used, which I am claiming is the result of T's obsession with booking everything immediately upon choosing a destination six months earlier. I am apparently among a tiny minority of travelers with this affliction as the agents at the three counters in the airport seemed to be mystified by an introduction to the effect of "there's a chance I may have a reservation with you, the name's Bailey". The other agencies were all located remotely, so we sat outside watching the shuttles go by until one bearing the name of the agency lumbered up and jogged my memory.
Shortly thereafter we were cruising up Interstate 15 in a little Jeep "Liberty", which is still known as the "Cherokee" in all other markets around the world. Apparently Indian names are no longer stylish in the US. The Liberty immediately began taking liberties with my requested course, and even after putting air in the appropriate tires, had I taken my hands off the wheel and mashed the accelerator, we could have made clockwise circles of about a half mile in diameter around the Salt Lake City are until the little Jeep ran out of gas. Also I noticed that it seemed to be getting tremendous gas mileage, which was actually a clever rouse by Chrysler engineers who included a 20-something gallon gas tank. So we could have made those circles for weeks, at least.
We switched to highway 89 and headed through the beautiful Cache Valley, toward Logan. In retrospect, this was undoubtedly the most beautiful part of our trip. I am usually not a sucker for turning leaves, but T and I were both ooh-ing and ahh-ing at every turn or change in elevation. It got even worse as we passed through Logan and into Logan Canyon, where we were soon up amongst the Aspen whose leaves shimmer like little gold coins when they are changing. We had a Famous Raspberry Shake at Bear Lake, which claims to be the raspberry capital of the world.
A mile or so and you're in Idaho, briefly, and then on into Wyoming, where we noticed a steep increase of the percentage of half-ton pickups with cowboy-hat-wearing (male or female) drivers. The scenery was fantastic, especially for a WV boy unaccustomed to roadway vistas of more than 50 yards or so in length. T was on the lookout for critters, but for now we had to settle for cows. The drive was deceivingly long, and even with the longer evenings in Wyoming it was still dark by the time we reached the section of the Snake River Canyon that we would follow into Jackson.
We arrived at our hotel and were greeted as Mr. and Mrs. Bailey for the first time without irony.
One of the advantages of small inns over typical hotels is that the proprieters treat hospitality as a form of art, rather than an obligation. I typically don't like to deal with the desk staff, concierge, or bellboy, because I think that ultimately they feel like they have no stake and I'm just another 3 bucks in the tip jar. In fact I'd be happier feeding quarters into some sort of robot baggage cart than I would spend those uncomfortable moments fumbling in my wallet to give cash to someone I'm not sure I like. However, I've now been to two of these modern inn-renaissance places (another on Cape Cod a while back), and somehow I've gone from feeling like I'm being looked at down the ridge of a nose to feeling like some manner of royalty, even if I go in the off or shoulder season.
The room at the Rusty Parrot was remarkable not for the things you noticed but for the things you didn’t. Things were where we expected them to be, the temperature changed magically at the right times. The light switches in the bathroom were on the wall across from the door would have made them hard to find in the dark but someone had noticed and strategically concealed a little nightlight that didn't make it hard to sleep when the bathroom door was open. They were happy to recommend and book outings for us, throwing it on our tab but without the typical hotel habit of charging three times what things are worth. The room was so great that we spent a lot of time just loafing around reading. I could get used to this kind of travel.
Day two was spend driving around in Grand Teton National Park. After getting married, driving all day back to Boston, then flying and driving all day to Jackson, we decided to expend as little energy as possible. My first impression of the Tetons was that, while they were stunning to behold, they didn't look as big as their elevation indicated. The reason for this is that even when you're at the very bottom of the valley in Jackson, you're still puffing and wheezing at around 6000 feet, so a 10,000 foot summit is in reality at the top of a measly 4000 foot mountain. So the hills back home are not as small, by comparison, as I thought, and the ones in New Hampshire are pretty huge. So my inferiority complex as a West Virginian is diminished, somewhat. Also, only a horny frenchman would think those things look like boobs.
I should mention at this point that the weather was stellar. After a solid week of rain before, during, and after the wedding, and after numerous harassing emails from my friend Jan (a Montanan) containing weather reports from Yellowstone that showed blizzards in August, we were worried we'd made a big mistake by not going to some tropical paradise. We apparently paid our penance and got 9 solid days of clear blue skies and temperatures in the 60s.
Some nice retired people from Flagstaff snapped our picture when we both stopped at the first turnout.
Our RV friends sent us off in search of moose that were purportedly strolling around by the river upstream. We found them and took some pictures.
The only time we'd seen moose before was during a swerve-fest in New Hampshire when I realized the horse standing in somebody's yard was actually not and started yelling and fumbling for the camera and almost sent us into a ditch. This was a much mellower encounter.
On the way home, we spotted some antelope hopping around.
Later that night I realized that, while my bag was stuffed, I had forgotten to bring nearly any of the necessities, such as socks, underwear, or deodorant. Fortunately, there is a K-Mart in Jackson.
On day 3, our new friend Ivan came to fetch us at the Parrot and drove us out to an old brushy field, where we were indentured and forced to drag what looked to be an enormous tacky windbreaker out of a giant duffle bag. Then this guy Bill pulled out a couple of huge fans a tank of propane and voila, we had our selves a heaping great balloon. Our fellow passengers were a couple of brothers and their wives, two of whom live half the time on Martha's Vineyard- small world. We were all somewhat skeptical initially about climbing into what amounts to a big picnic basket, but it was about 20 degrees and we weren't too proud to snuggle.
On television, you'll see balloons soaring peacefully, their float occasionally puncuated by flickers of the overhead propane burners. Let me tell you, there is nothing peaceful about the burner. One moment Bill the balloon pilot is telling you about the history of the balloon and a few things to know prior to liftoff, the next he's yanking the handle and a blast of flame that would make Iron Chef Kenichi raise an eyebrow or two is about two inches from your ear. It was toasty, at least.
Flying a balloon is like going tandem skydiving, in reverse. You take off fast and silently, and any little motion in the balloon is disconcerting. Also all the hard stuff is done for you. I watched Bill gazing off at wind balloons that only he could see, peering through a tiny pair of binoculars at some windsocks on various mountain tops in our vicinity, and frequently spitting over the side of the balloon, in what I initially believed to be a nasty habit but that turned out to be a means for determining the wind direction at lower altitudes. When asked by one of the other passengers how Bill steered the balloon, he answered matter-of-factly and to our collective chagrin that "we can't, actually," but then demonstrated the spitting and peering method of catching favorable breezes, and we went floating serenely the length of Jackson Hole. Occasionally I'd feel a breeze on my neck, comfy after being razed by the burner, but I'd notice Bill get antsy each time. He explained that when we felt a breeze, it was due to a difference in wind-speed and direction between the top and bottom of the balloon, and it meant we were about to change course. Very subtle art, this balloon flying.
In order to catch the good waves, we descended and ascended several times covering thousands of vertical feet. At one point we made a low pass over a piece of Fish Creek, and I started drooling when I could see big cuthroat trout hanging out at the tail of little eddies, breaking away occasionally to grab a bug. The rivers in Wyoming are nothing like the muddy ones back home. You can see straight to the bottom and the fish can see you, too. We saw a coyote chasing ducks as we made our first attempt at landing, which Bill waved off after it appeared we would crash into some little trees along the creek. I thought, worst case, I could break off a branch and do a little fishing while we waited for the recovery vehicles.
Soon we were soaring again, and Bill picked out a spot downstream between some high tension power lines and the boundary of some non-balloon-friendly property owners. It was quite a thrill, but soon we were on the ground and sipping the Mimosa that is customary following successful landings (I assume they are also had after less than successful landings providing that the inhabitants and champagne are uninjured), which Bill explained as a custom originated in order to loosen up shotgun wielding country bumpkins into whose fields the balloon might have veered into. A very sensible idea, if you ask me.
That evening, we hiked the shoreline of Jenny Lake, a body of water formed in a little trough where the plate that forms the Tetons is subducted beneath the plate that forms the floor of Jackson Hole. T was certain that we would be eaten by bears, so we bought her a little whistle in lieu of the bear bells that our buddy Ivan told us about during a series of bear-mauling stories that he had been kind enough to tell T on the way back from the balloon ride. I brought a pair of running shoes instead. However, the most fearsome critters we saw were some chipmunks and another cuttie who was trolling around the perimeter of the lake jumping picturesquely and at whom I threw pebbles at in frustration of not having brought my rod along. 6 miles or so at 6000 feet is a haul for a budding fat kid, but I promised myself a lot of junk food when we got home.
We ate at this incredible burrito stand (whose menu proudly proclaimed "we are not a fast food place") that night, and I was in heaven. This place, whose name escapes me, and another place we ate the first night, were some of the best Mexican food I've had since leaving WV and my beloved Rio Grande restaurants. My enchiladas alone were worth the trip to Jackson.
Day four was set aside for a float fishing trip on the Snake river. The trip had me nervous- I was afraid T would have a lousy time fishing with an open-face spinning reel she might not figure out how to work quite right, and I was worried about fly casting in front of someone who does it for a living. Plus I'd never caught a trout more than about 4 inches on a fly rod, period. My concerns were all unwarranted. Our guide, Jason, spent the day fiddling with my cast and getting me mending correctly to get long floats going. He also had T casting some spoons and plugs like a champ in no time, and she had a 17" cuttie in the boat within 15 minutes or so. I was so excited at the improvements to my casting that I almost forgot entirely about catching fish, so it was a huge bonus when I actually caught a few. Other highlights were seeing a pair of bald eagles, and having lunch at Harrison Ford's place (well, on the bank of part of the 3 miles or so of the Snake he owns) while he buzzed around overhead in his helicopter. My big fish was a 16" or so cuttie on a White Wolff as we were about to pack it in for the trip down to the take out. T outfished me 3 to 1, as usual, but we figured I got bonus points for sticking with the fly rod.
That night we visited the Snake River Grill for our obligatory fancy honeymoon dinner. T had a scandalously large rack of lamb and I a couple of Elk chops. Then we drank a bottle of wine and made asses of ourselves in a drunken trivia match involving the wait staff when none of us could remember the name of the toy that sounded "The Cow Says MOOOO" when you pulled a string. We ended up winning, but it was a hollow victory, because we knew we were jackasses.
The next day was our last in Jackson, so we grudgingly turned in our keys at the Rusty Parrot and headed for Yellowstone. We snuck in a fast horse ride (well, it was a actually a plodding one, but it only lasted an hour) at a place called the Spring Creek Ranch, where authentic cowboys got us saddled up for a little trip up Spring Creek Butte. We were the epitome of hapless dudes in our matching (not intentional, so help me) coats and my baggy khaki pants that guide Mark pointed out were not the proper britches for horse ridin. Although I am indeed a country boy, I managed to miss the equestrian sections of my training and had only the most rudimentary knowledge of horse operation, consisting mainly of little rules about where not to stand when near a horsey. With the help of a little stool, T was hoisted onto her mighty steed Mickey, and then the cowboys led what appeared to be an old plow horse named Saul out of the barn toward me. Saul was a good third larger than any of the other horses and knew the routine so well that I didn't have to do much of anything except hang on, and keep my britches legs in check.
As we started down the trail, T's horse began to shit voluminously all over the path in front of Saul, who was obviously displeased about it and decided to leave the path rather than walk in it, which seemed reasonable and I offered no objections and hung on for dear life. Having figured out he was in charge, and being at the rear of the line, Saul would occasionally stop to eat, which also seemed reasonable since I weigh a fair bit and if I were carrying somebody I'd hope they wouldn’t mind if I needed to stop for a snack. Mark pointed out that this was a bad idea, and having grounding in discipline myself I could that Saul might start taking other liberties with me if I kept going allowing snack-breaks, so I took Mark's advice to yank 'em reins like I meant it, and soon Saul knew who was boss. Well until Mark's dog decided to walk the perilously poop-covered path just in front of Saul, who wasn't having any of it and started doing a little horse Kung-fu with his front legs. Yanking the reins on a horse seems to solve as many problems as the word "smurf" to a Smurf, and so I put the kibosh on the dog-kicking, and Saul mostly behaved himself after that.
The trip up the butte was beautiful. Country you have seen even a few times before has a magical way of seeming stunning all over again when you approach it by a different means, and on the back of a horse this is particularly true. I snapped a few photos of Tricia and Mickey.
On the trail back, Saul stopped suddenly, solidly, and inexplicably. It was then I learned, and was grateful for, one of the fundamental differences between Saul and myself, and that is that if I needed to take a huge crap while I was out on the trail, I'd run like a scalded dog back to the barn to do my business. Saul, on the other hand, casually and without a trace of shame made his deposit mid-trail while the rest of the party wound back toward the ranch. After a few confused attempts to spur Saul on, I heard the thuds behind us and, with a glimmer of insight, told good ole Saul to take his time, as I understood completely.
I figured Saul would love me after that, but moments later he began to veer off course into some scrubby little trees in what seemed to be an attempt to knock me off. Some gratitude. However, Mark cleared things up; Saul wanted his belly scratched. Further, if he was trying to knock me off, he'd use some of the bigger trees that were just ahead. I tried to relax.
Back at the barn, Saul demonstrated his keen horse-smarts. When one of the trainers emerged from the barn, Saul hooved it straight over to her, despite my reined objections. She was carrying the bucket of horse cookies of which a few were Saul's after each ride, too far away to see or smell but Saul knew if he was a good boy, he'd get a cookie. It was fun to get to hang around on his back while Saul went about his day to day business, and I hope I'll get to see him again, sometime. I gave him a good belly scratching goodbye.
We left the ranch and headed north to Yellowstone. As a geology dork, I could go on for pages about Yellowstone, but in the interest of my beloved readers I will spare you the agony. I bought a big book that explains it all and you can borrow it, if you like. On the way up to West Yellowstone, which was to be our base of operations during out tour of the park, we stopped at the West Thumb geyser basin, where I saw my first bubbling mud pots and hot springs, and then drove up to Old Faithful which erupted on cue and of which I took some unbelievably bad video footage when the enormous steam cloud opted to move in our direction and upon which the camera tried in vain to focus.
I know we saw Bison this day but my memories of animal sightings are a bit blurry. T was in wildlife ecstasy and we were stopping the car left and right to gawk and point one of our growing fleet of various optical implements at the creatures. Occasionally I'd wonder if we might not enjoy the sights more if we weren't so hell bent on committing them to some manner of artificial memory, but the thrill of returning to the hotel each night and watching the days footage was probably worth it. There were Elk, Bison, coyotes, various birds, an occasional grizzly bear. Some days we forgot to bring film, other days we forgot to charge the video camera, so we have a weird assortment of photos and videos of the critters we saw. I would highly recommend that any trip to the park be preceded by a trip to the binocular store, however, as a lot of the coolest stuff we saw was through our pair.
We decided that with so much time on our hands that, unlike the vacations of our childhood, we'd indulge every childlike curiosity that came to us and stop at every turnout, follow every scenic sideroad, and stop to read the placards. This was exciting at first, but after a couple of days as Yellowstone tourists we became rather jaded by frequent roadside attractions and focused more on interesting stuff we'd found in our books. T navigated masterfully, for once.
The first night we spent in West Yellowstone started somewhat dubiously. We were worried about stories we'd heard about the town being populated only by ghosts immediately after the conclusion of the summer tourist season, and our first cursory views of the town as we drove around looking for our hotel seemed to confirm that. Everything appeared to be closed, and it only took a few moments to drive to the outskirts of the teeny town, which were run-down looking, nothing like Jackson. I wondered if we hadn't made a mistake by leaving our posh room and fine dining at the Rusty Parrot, and I wondered when I'd gotten so spoiled. T volunteered to telephone for directions, and a few minutes later we were headed toward the other side of town, which we'd missed seeing entirely on our way in.
Here we found unexpected wonders. A big Grizzly Bear and Wolf exhibit center, a McDonalds, myriad hotels and motels, and to my shock and amazement, an IMAX theatre which appeared open for business. Just down the street was our hotel, the Hibernation Station cabins, which turned out to be fantastic log cabins virtually as comfortable as our previous accomodations. The folks at the desk gave us the standard issue West Yellowstone travel map with the places that were still open this late in the season. Because the few restaurants that remained open during the off season fill up quick, we wound up corralled in a family-stylem (i.e. no booze) place at the end of the strip along with a busload of Japanese tourists who were having trouble speaking Montanan with the proprietor. It was a hoot, and I had some excellent meatloaf. Over the next few nights we ate early and it turns out there are some fantastic places to eat in West Yellowstone.
The next few days in Yellowstone were mostly more of the same. We followed most of the drivable roads in the park, cutting short one day when we realized our rental car agreement expressly forbade out of state trips. We went back to the hotel and planned how we'd spend our prison sentences, but then had a few drinks and forgot about it. We saw most of what you could see by car, but we spent a lot of time wondering if we might have gotten a better appreciation by doing more camping and hiking and that sort of stuff. My belief is that hiking and camping are things one does only in order to make fishing or hunting convenient, walking through the woods for its own sake bores me to tears as I spent the better part of my youth there and am thus completely jaded. The hardest part of Yellowstone for me was watching all these guys fishing the Firehole and Yellowstone rivers and not being able to wade in, myself, so I think in the future we'll make another trip and let T try her hand at tenting and me some fishin.
In the next installment, I'll talk about the bad news at the end of the trip, and a little about how things changed when we got home.
Monday before last Mrs. Bailey and I ordered a Green Cab over to Logan, to catch our flight out to Salt Lake to begin the first leg of our wild-west honeymoon. Well, as wild as the shoulder season at Jackson Hole and Yellowstone can be. Green Cab is the only way to fly in Somerville, every driver will remind you in some way of your grandfather or great uncle jerry and the cars tend to be less ramshackle than most of the other outfits who've taxied me.
Logan has developed a clever technique for confusing would-be terrorists by randomizing the means allotted for check in. This day we chose the little computer check-in kiosk (with bag check, even!), despite the modest line at the human check-in counter. After negotiating a dozen screens requesting information, it asked us for a confirmation number. Confirmation verification screens, I believe, are the result of contract programmers who had trouble doing left outer joins or something and found it easier to just prompt the user, intentionally ignoring the knowledge that it would set off those travelers prone to arm-waving fits of frustration.
Stymied, we returned to the human check-in counter line, where I sulked about not having written down the number. T asked if perhaps the agent assigned to the computer check in spots could give us the confirmation number, and I lectured her about the necessity of multiple forms of verification, and how agents were forbidden from giving out bits of personal information at the counter. Then T went over and asked, and around 2 minutes later we were checked with boarding passes in hand. I am not completely oblivious to these lessons but I am definitely learning too slowly.
Upon arrival at Salt Lake, we headed over to the rental car counter, where I discovered that I had forgotten which of the companies I had used, which I am claiming is the result of T's obsession with booking everything immediately upon choosing a destination six months earlier. I am apparently among a tiny minority of travelers with this affliction as the agents at the three counters in the airport seemed to be mystified by an introduction to the effect of "there's a chance I may have a reservation with you, the name's Bailey". The other agencies were all located remotely, so we sat outside watching the shuttles go by until one bearing the name of the agency lumbered up and jogged my memory.
Shortly thereafter we were cruising up Interstate 15 in a little Jeep "Liberty", which is still known as the "Cherokee" in all other markets around the world. Apparently Indian names are no longer stylish in the US. The Liberty immediately began taking liberties with my requested course, and even after putting air in the appropriate tires, had I taken my hands off the wheel and mashed the accelerator, we could have made clockwise circles of about a half mile in diameter around the Salt Lake City are until the little Jeep ran out of gas. Also I noticed that it seemed to be getting tremendous gas mileage, which was actually a clever rouse by Chrysler engineers who included a 20-something gallon gas tank. So we could have made those circles for weeks, at least.
We switched to highway 89 and headed through the beautiful Cache Valley, toward Logan. In retrospect, this was undoubtedly the most beautiful part of our trip. I am usually not a sucker for turning leaves, but T and I were both ooh-ing and ahh-ing at every turn or change in elevation. It got even worse as we passed through Logan and into Logan Canyon, where we were soon up amongst the Aspen whose leaves shimmer like little gold coins when they are changing. We had a Famous Raspberry Shake at Bear Lake, which claims to be the raspberry capital of the world.
A mile or so and you're in Idaho, briefly, and then on into Wyoming, where we noticed a steep increase of the percentage of half-ton pickups with cowboy-hat-wearing (male or female) drivers. The scenery was fantastic, especially for a WV boy unaccustomed to roadway vistas of more than 50 yards or so in length. T was on the lookout for critters, but for now we had to settle for cows. The drive was deceivingly long, and even with the longer evenings in Wyoming it was still dark by the time we reached the section of the Snake River Canyon that we would follow into Jackson.
We arrived at our hotel and were greeted as Mr. and Mrs. Bailey for the first time without irony.
One of the advantages of small inns over typical hotels is that the proprieters treat hospitality as a form of art, rather than an obligation. I typically don't like to deal with the desk staff, concierge, or bellboy, because I think that ultimately they feel like they have no stake and I'm just another 3 bucks in the tip jar. In fact I'd be happier feeding quarters into some sort of robot baggage cart than I would spend those uncomfortable moments fumbling in my wallet to give cash to someone I'm not sure I like. However, I've now been to two of these modern inn-renaissance places (another on Cape Cod a while back), and somehow I've gone from feeling like I'm being looked at down the ridge of a nose to feeling like some manner of royalty, even if I go in the off or shoulder season.
The room at the Rusty Parrot was remarkable not for the things you noticed but for the things you didn’t. Things were where we expected them to be, the temperature changed magically at the right times. The light switches in the bathroom were on the wall across from the door would have made them hard to find in the dark but someone had noticed and strategically concealed a little nightlight that didn't make it hard to sleep when the bathroom door was open. They were happy to recommend and book outings for us, throwing it on our tab but without the typical hotel habit of charging three times what things are worth. The room was so great that we spent a lot of time just loafing around reading. I could get used to this kind of travel.
Day two was spend driving around in Grand Teton National Park. After getting married, driving all day back to Boston, then flying and driving all day to Jackson, we decided to expend as little energy as possible. My first impression of the Tetons was that, while they were stunning to behold, they didn't look as big as their elevation indicated. The reason for this is that even when you're at the very bottom of the valley in Jackson, you're still puffing and wheezing at around 6000 feet, so a 10,000 foot summit is in reality at the top of a measly 4000 foot mountain. So the hills back home are not as small, by comparison, as I thought, and the ones in New Hampshire are pretty huge. So my inferiority complex as a West Virginian is diminished, somewhat. Also, only a horny frenchman would think those things look like boobs.
I should mention at this point that the weather was stellar. After a solid week of rain before, during, and after the wedding, and after numerous harassing emails from my friend Jan (a Montanan) containing weather reports from Yellowstone that showed blizzards in August, we were worried we'd made a big mistake by not going to some tropical paradise. We apparently paid our penance and got 9 solid days of clear blue skies and temperatures in the 60s.
Some nice retired people from Flagstaff snapped our picture when we both stopped at the first turnout.
Our RV friends sent us off in search of moose that were purportedly strolling around by the river upstream. We found them and took some pictures.
The only time we'd seen moose before was during a swerve-fest in New Hampshire when I realized the horse standing in somebody's yard was actually not and started yelling and fumbling for the camera and almost sent us into a ditch. This was a much mellower encounter.
On the way home, we spotted some antelope hopping around.
Later that night I realized that, while my bag was stuffed, I had forgotten to bring nearly any of the necessities, such as socks, underwear, or deodorant. Fortunately, there is a K-Mart in Jackson.
On day 3, our new friend Ivan came to fetch us at the Parrot and drove us out to an old brushy field, where we were indentured and forced to drag what looked to be an enormous tacky windbreaker out of a giant duffle bag. Then this guy Bill pulled out a couple of huge fans a tank of propane and voila, we had our selves a heaping great balloon. Our fellow passengers were a couple of brothers and their wives, two of whom live half the time on Martha's Vineyard- small world. We were all somewhat skeptical initially about climbing into what amounts to a big picnic basket, but it was about 20 degrees and we weren't too proud to snuggle.
On television, you'll see balloons soaring peacefully, their float occasionally puncuated by flickers of the overhead propane burners. Let me tell you, there is nothing peaceful about the burner. One moment Bill the balloon pilot is telling you about the history of the balloon and a few things to know prior to liftoff, the next he's yanking the handle and a blast of flame that would make Iron Chef Kenichi raise an eyebrow or two is about two inches from your ear. It was toasty, at least.
Flying a balloon is like going tandem skydiving, in reverse. You take off fast and silently, and any little motion in the balloon is disconcerting. Also all the hard stuff is done for you. I watched Bill gazing off at wind balloons that only he could see, peering through a tiny pair of binoculars at some windsocks on various mountain tops in our vicinity, and frequently spitting over the side of the balloon, in what I initially believed to be a nasty habit but that turned out to be a means for determining the wind direction at lower altitudes. When asked by one of the other passengers how Bill steered the balloon, he answered matter-of-factly and to our collective chagrin that "we can't, actually," but then demonstrated the spitting and peering method of catching favorable breezes, and we went floating serenely the length of Jackson Hole. Occasionally I'd feel a breeze on my neck, comfy after being razed by the burner, but I'd notice Bill get antsy each time. He explained that when we felt a breeze, it was due to a difference in wind-speed and direction between the top and bottom of the balloon, and it meant we were about to change course. Very subtle art, this balloon flying.
In order to catch the good waves, we descended and ascended several times covering thousands of vertical feet. At one point we made a low pass over a piece of Fish Creek, and I started drooling when I could see big cuthroat trout hanging out at the tail of little eddies, breaking away occasionally to grab a bug. The rivers in Wyoming are nothing like the muddy ones back home. You can see straight to the bottom and the fish can see you, too. We saw a coyote chasing ducks as we made our first attempt at landing, which Bill waved off after it appeared we would crash into some little trees along the creek. I thought, worst case, I could break off a branch and do a little fishing while we waited for the recovery vehicles.
Soon we were soaring again, and Bill picked out a spot downstream between some high tension power lines and the boundary of some non-balloon-friendly property owners. It was quite a thrill, but soon we were on the ground and sipping the Mimosa that is customary following successful landings (I assume they are also had after less than successful landings providing that the inhabitants and champagne are uninjured), which Bill explained as a custom originated in order to loosen up shotgun wielding country bumpkins into whose fields the balloon might have veered into. A very sensible idea, if you ask me.
That evening, we hiked the shoreline of Jenny Lake, a body of water formed in a little trough where the plate that forms the Tetons is subducted beneath the plate that forms the floor of Jackson Hole. T was certain that we would be eaten by bears, so we bought her a little whistle in lieu of the bear bells that our buddy Ivan told us about during a series of bear-mauling stories that he had been kind enough to tell T on the way back from the balloon ride. I brought a pair of running shoes instead. However, the most fearsome critters we saw were some chipmunks and another cuttie who was trolling around the perimeter of the lake jumping picturesquely and at whom I threw pebbles at in frustration of not having brought my rod along. 6 miles or so at 6000 feet is a haul for a budding fat kid, but I promised myself a lot of junk food when we got home.
We ate at this incredible burrito stand (whose menu proudly proclaimed "we are not a fast food place") that night, and I was in heaven. This place, whose name escapes me, and another place we ate the first night, were some of the best Mexican food I've had since leaving WV and my beloved Rio Grande restaurants. My enchiladas alone were worth the trip to Jackson.
Day four was set aside for a float fishing trip on the Snake river. The trip had me nervous- I was afraid T would have a lousy time fishing with an open-face spinning reel she might not figure out how to work quite right, and I was worried about fly casting in front of someone who does it for a living. Plus I'd never caught a trout more than about 4 inches on a fly rod, period. My concerns were all unwarranted. Our guide, Jason, spent the day fiddling with my cast and getting me mending correctly to get long floats going. He also had T casting some spoons and plugs like a champ in no time, and she had a 17" cuttie in the boat within 15 minutes or so. I was so excited at the improvements to my casting that I almost forgot entirely about catching fish, so it was a huge bonus when I actually caught a few. Other highlights were seeing a pair of bald eagles, and having lunch at Harrison Ford's place (well, on the bank of part of the 3 miles or so of the Snake he owns) while he buzzed around overhead in his helicopter. My big fish was a 16" or so cuttie on a White Wolff as we were about to pack it in for the trip down to the take out. T outfished me 3 to 1, as usual, but we figured I got bonus points for sticking with the fly rod.
That night we visited the Snake River Grill for our obligatory fancy honeymoon dinner. T had a scandalously large rack of lamb and I a couple of Elk chops. Then we drank a bottle of wine and made asses of ourselves in a drunken trivia match involving the wait staff when none of us could remember the name of the toy that sounded "The Cow Says MOOOO" when you pulled a string. We ended up winning, but it was a hollow victory, because we knew we were jackasses.
The next day was our last in Jackson, so we grudgingly turned in our keys at the Rusty Parrot and headed for Yellowstone. We snuck in a fast horse ride (well, it was a actually a plodding one, but it only lasted an hour) at a place called the Spring Creek Ranch, where authentic cowboys got us saddled up for a little trip up Spring Creek Butte. We were the epitome of hapless dudes in our matching (not intentional, so help me) coats and my baggy khaki pants that guide Mark pointed out were not the proper britches for horse ridin. Although I am indeed a country boy, I managed to miss the equestrian sections of my training and had only the most rudimentary knowledge of horse operation, consisting mainly of little rules about where not to stand when near a horsey. With the help of a little stool, T was hoisted onto her mighty steed Mickey, and then the cowboys led what appeared to be an old plow horse named Saul out of the barn toward me. Saul was a good third larger than any of the other horses and knew the routine so well that I didn't have to do much of anything except hang on, and keep my britches legs in check.
As we started down the trail, T's horse began to shit voluminously all over the path in front of Saul, who was obviously displeased about it and decided to leave the path rather than walk in it, which seemed reasonable and I offered no objections and hung on for dear life. Having figured out he was in charge, and being at the rear of the line, Saul would occasionally stop to eat, which also seemed reasonable since I weigh a fair bit and if I were carrying somebody I'd hope they wouldn’t mind if I needed to stop for a snack. Mark pointed out that this was a bad idea, and having grounding in discipline myself I could that Saul might start taking other liberties with me if I kept going allowing snack-breaks, so I took Mark's advice to yank 'em reins like I meant it, and soon Saul knew who was boss. Well until Mark's dog decided to walk the perilously poop-covered path just in front of Saul, who wasn't having any of it and started doing a little horse Kung-fu with his front legs. Yanking the reins on a horse seems to solve as many problems as the word "smurf" to a Smurf, and so I put the kibosh on the dog-kicking, and Saul mostly behaved himself after that.
The trip up the butte was beautiful. Country you have seen even a few times before has a magical way of seeming stunning all over again when you approach it by a different means, and on the back of a horse this is particularly true. I snapped a few photos of Tricia and Mickey.
On the trail back, Saul stopped suddenly, solidly, and inexplicably. It was then I learned, and was grateful for, one of the fundamental differences between Saul and myself, and that is that if I needed to take a huge crap while I was out on the trail, I'd run like a scalded dog back to the barn to do my business. Saul, on the other hand, casually and without a trace of shame made his deposit mid-trail while the rest of the party wound back toward the ranch. After a few confused attempts to spur Saul on, I heard the thuds behind us and, with a glimmer of insight, told good ole Saul to take his time, as I understood completely.
I figured Saul would love me after that, but moments later he began to veer off course into some scrubby little trees in what seemed to be an attempt to knock me off. Some gratitude. However, Mark cleared things up; Saul wanted his belly scratched. Further, if he was trying to knock me off, he'd use some of the bigger trees that were just ahead. I tried to relax.
Back at the barn, Saul demonstrated his keen horse-smarts. When one of the trainers emerged from the barn, Saul hooved it straight over to her, despite my reined objections. She was carrying the bucket of horse cookies of which a few were Saul's after each ride, too far away to see or smell but Saul knew if he was a good boy, he'd get a cookie. It was fun to get to hang around on his back while Saul went about his day to day business, and I hope I'll get to see him again, sometime. I gave him a good belly scratching goodbye.
We left the ranch and headed north to Yellowstone. As a geology dork, I could go on for pages about Yellowstone, but in the interest of my beloved readers I will spare you the agony. I bought a big book that explains it all and you can borrow it, if you like. On the way up to West Yellowstone, which was to be our base of operations during out tour of the park, we stopped at the West Thumb geyser basin, where I saw my first bubbling mud pots and hot springs, and then drove up to Old Faithful which erupted on cue and of which I took some unbelievably bad video footage when the enormous steam cloud opted to move in our direction and upon which the camera tried in vain to focus.
I know we saw Bison this day but my memories of animal sightings are a bit blurry. T was in wildlife ecstasy and we were stopping the car left and right to gawk and point one of our growing fleet of various optical implements at the creatures. Occasionally I'd wonder if we might not enjoy the sights more if we weren't so hell bent on committing them to some manner of artificial memory, but the thrill of returning to the hotel each night and watching the days footage was probably worth it. There were Elk, Bison, coyotes, various birds, an occasional grizzly bear. Some days we forgot to bring film, other days we forgot to charge the video camera, so we have a weird assortment of photos and videos of the critters we saw. I would highly recommend that any trip to the park be preceded by a trip to the binocular store, however, as a lot of the coolest stuff we saw was through our pair.
We decided that with so much time on our hands that, unlike the vacations of our childhood, we'd indulge every childlike curiosity that came to us and stop at every turnout, follow every scenic sideroad, and stop to read the placards. This was exciting at first, but after a couple of days as Yellowstone tourists we became rather jaded by frequent roadside attractions and focused more on interesting stuff we'd found in our books. T navigated masterfully, for once.
The first night we spent in West Yellowstone started somewhat dubiously. We were worried about stories we'd heard about the town being populated only by ghosts immediately after the conclusion of the summer tourist season, and our first cursory views of the town as we drove around looking for our hotel seemed to confirm that. Everything appeared to be closed, and it only took a few moments to drive to the outskirts of the teeny town, which were run-down looking, nothing like Jackson. I wondered if we hadn't made a mistake by leaving our posh room and fine dining at the Rusty Parrot, and I wondered when I'd gotten so spoiled. T volunteered to telephone for directions, and a few minutes later we were headed toward the other side of town, which we'd missed seeing entirely on our way in.
Here we found unexpected wonders. A big Grizzly Bear and Wolf exhibit center, a McDonalds, myriad hotels and motels, and to my shock and amazement, an IMAX theatre which appeared open for business. Just down the street was our hotel, the Hibernation Station cabins, which turned out to be fantastic log cabins virtually as comfortable as our previous accomodations. The folks at the desk gave us the standard issue West Yellowstone travel map with the places that were still open this late in the season. Because the few restaurants that remained open during the off season fill up quick, we wound up corralled in a family-stylem (i.e. no booze) place at the end of the strip along with a busload of Japanese tourists who were having trouble speaking Montanan with the proprietor. It was a hoot, and I had some excellent meatloaf. Over the next few nights we ate early and it turns out there are some fantastic places to eat in West Yellowstone.
The next few days in Yellowstone were mostly more of the same. We followed most of the drivable roads in the park, cutting short one day when we realized our rental car agreement expressly forbade out of state trips. We went back to the hotel and planned how we'd spend our prison sentences, but then had a few drinks and forgot about it. We saw most of what you could see by car, but we spent a lot of time wondering if we might have gotten a better appreciation by doing more camping and hiking and that sort of stuff. My belief is that hiking and camping are things one does only in order to make fishing or hunting convenient, walking through the woods for its own sake bores me to tears as I spent the better part of my youth there and am thus completely jaded. The hardest part of Yellowstone for me was watching all these guys fishing the Firehole and Yellowstone rivers and not being able to wade in, myself, so I think in the future we'll make another trip and let T try her hand at tenting and me some fishin.
In the next installment, I'll talk about the bad news at the end of the trip, and a little about how things changed when we got home.
Friday, October 25, 2002
One of the great surprises about my own wedding was that, at least most of the time, it was not remarkably different from going to someone else's wedding.
I am terribly prone to distraction, and as a result, I am plagued by episodes in which, at some event (particularly solemn or otherwise moving occasions), I start to daydream a little, and then come to. It takes me a moment to figure out where I am. This must have happened at least 10 times Saturday before last- me, standing around a church in my tuxedo, struggling for an instant to remember whose wedding I was at. Then I'd remember and I couldn't help but grin like an idiot for most of the ceremony as a result.
Anyhow I'm getting ahead of myself. I should go back a little.
No solemn occasion is complete without a few small scale disasters.
First, a few days before the ceremony, the best man was scheduled to arrive at an airport on Long Island. In typical Bailey fashion, we eschewed the customary exhaustive exchange of telephone, cellular, and pager numbers, essentially guaranteeing (at least in the case of persons prone to anxiety) that any flight related snafus would escalate into calamity. Art Cohenour does not tend toward anxiety, and thus when we go places or do things together, I bask in his glow of laid-backness, and relax by osmosis. When Art did not arrive at the prescribed time, I worried for a moment, checked the time of the next flight from Cincinnati, and went home. It is precisely what Art would have done for me, and as a result, it worked out perfectly. "Relax", the world seemed to be saying, so I did.
At some point during the interval between those flights, a rain of biblical proportions began that would persist steadily for the next 4 or 5 days. People will tell you that it's good luck to have rain on your wedding day. If that's true, then I'm going to be one lucky bastard. The deluge was such that a small lake formed in the parking lot of the hotel at which most of my out of town relatives stayed. Any birch trees amongst the foliage would have been certain targets. While it did not foil our plans to take Mr. Cohenour into the city that night, it certainly spoiled them, as we spent several hours damp and cold and chasing taxicabs. It was just like being back in Boston.
The next day, members of my family began to arrive in Massapequa. Over the past three years of travel around Boston and New York, I've bumped into precisely zero people that I knew from back home, or even recognized (except for Al Sharpton, who we bumped into near Times Square a while back. What hair that man has.). As a result, the experience of seeing car after car full of familiar but contextually incorrect faces pulling into a Best Western was one of the most surreal experiences in recent memory.
My family, while extraordinarily social, is not terribly exploratory in nature and thus, within minutes there was a family reunion going on in my parent's room but everybody was worried about getting lost driving around town to look for food. It's interesting how many things you notice about your family as a result of discovering things about yourself. I was reminded of my first few trepidations walks from James Welborn's Winter Hill apartment in search of food; James had scarcely a month's worth more clue about Boston than I, but he had his battle wagon and no fear. In keeping with the reunion motif, however, covered dishes magically appeared like loaves and fishes, and there was a lot of TV and eating going on. The Bailey/Cohenour base camp was just like being home.
Later we had a rehearsal. The Catholics have really got the whole wedding thing down to a science. Weeks beforehand, we had checked off boxes below a series of multiple choice questions on a form that allowed modest customization of the wedding. It was basically like ordering a car, only instead of alloy wheel patterns and stereo packages we had selections like Ave Maria vs. Ode to Joy and things about Beatitudes and Colossians and cheesemakers and all kinds of gibberish that I must have missed at Vacation Bible School. Our salesman, Mike, had studied our order form ahead of time, and the instructions he gave sounded so natural and simple that I basically forgot them immediately after he uttered them, which I barely but fortunately recognized as a tremendously bad thing. Sort of like those few rare occasions when I am introduced to someone important and I actually remember to listen to their name as I'm being introduced. Anyhow I didn't want to mess around at any wedding where Italians, particularly ones from the Bronx, are involved so I paid very careful attention to Mike's instructions. They left a little room for artistic license, and that worried me. I was hoping for some written instructions but Mike apparently felt confident enough in the lot of us after 15 minutes or so that we were railroaded out of the church and off in search of the restaurant that we'd booked for the rehearsal dinner.
West Virginians appreciate food like nobody you ever met. We have one, maybe two, Italian restaurants in the state and I was excited to see what the folks were going to make of this little place on Long Island. Things like a pasta course are simply mystifying to us when first encountered. The delightful refractory period between courses is, to us, the epitome of decadence. Delicious non-pink wine flowed freely and it wasn't long until people started inviting each other to their homes for lengthy stays next summer and my father started talking about gun control. Tricia and I had taken careful steps to ensure that the seating would create maximal rowdiness, and we were not disappointed. If the rehearsal dinner was any sort of indicator for the level of excitement we could expect the following night, we were in for a riot.
My entourage (this is perhaps the only time in my life I get to have one, so by god, that's what I'll call them) had designs for a night of boozing, as is more often the case than not for most of them. I was, frankly, beat but I figured, "here I am, making the ultimate leap into wussdome and they're never going to let me get away unscathed." We returned to the hotel to put on our drinking pants but within about 30 seconds the great Arthur Cohenour lay sprawled and snoring and that was the end of the debauchery after the rehearsal dinner.
When I had imagined getting married it was moments like these, more than the actual pageantry and ceremony itself, that engaged my curiosity. What did guys think about while they were trying to go to sleep the night before getting married? Were there strange rituals amongst the groomsmen? Initiation ceremonies? Fear? Trepidation? I watched a little Letterman and fell asleep.
I woke up at 7, and I was hungrier than I have ever been at that hour. Perhaps ancient humans occasionally ate their mates after courtship. I had sausage in mind, though. However, I was paralyzed by laziness, the same sort of laziness that prevents you from getting out of bed early in the morning to pee despite the fact that you'll lay there swollen and uncomfortable for hours. Only in my case I was starving and couldn't bring myself to meander down to the continental breakfast. It was at this point that one of the greatest acts of human kindness, of a father's love for a son, that I have ever witnessed occurred. There was a knock at the door, and waiting outside was my dad, sporting a halo and carrying an armload of Burger King bags full of breakfast sandwiches, chosen in Avery Bailey style- 'give me three or four of everything because I can't make any damn sense of that menu'. That was the second closest time I'd come to tears during the weekend. Art Cohenour immediately regained consciousness in the presence of Crispy Crowns, and we had a feast and shot the shit with dad for a half hour or so. I hope some day I have a son, just so I can bring him a bag of fast food breakfast on his wedding day.
The balance of the morning was spent loafing and later Art and I swam to the strip mall across from our hotel to get a haircut. Members of the entourage questioned the wisdom of my intention to get a 12 dollar haircut just hours before my own wedding, but as a frequenter of 6 dollar haircut establishments, a trip to Supercuts is nearly as exciting as a personal visit from Vidal Sassoon, and anyway it was my last opportunity to have 18 year old girls running their fingers through my hair. Afterwards, elder cousin Dr. Heath Bailey, who always looks after the rest of us pipsqueaks, drove me to Toys R Us for requisition of a gift for our ring bearer. We were leaning toward loud and dangerous, but there were no BB guns or firecrackers of any sort, so we settled for a Nerf blaster. I expected he could have a spot of fun at the reception with it.
Back at the hotel, the groomsmen were delighted to learn that there'd be an honest to god limousine coming to take us to the church. Seconds after boarding, Mike Bailey nearly sent a plastic champagne cork through the roof of the car, nearly giving both himself and our driver Vinny a heart attack and sending us veering. Vinny, after regaining control and immediately sensing of Mike's ability to create disorder, earnestly advised us (after our assurances that the color-cycling neon roof light was undamaged) that certain priests had been known to refuse admittance to those members of wedding parties smelling of sin-juice, and so Mike replaced the cork and the groomsmen got down to the business of giving me a number of gifts procured from area adult novelty shops, whose presence in my pockets during a wedding ceremony would likely be grounds for instant excommunication. I made my best effort to place the items in pockets that I would be unlikely to stick a hand in during the ceremony, and that there were no other even vaguely ring-box shaped packages in Art's possession.
At all weddings I'd attended previously, I'd gotten the distinct impression that somewhere in the church was a man in a headset whispering instructions to a crew in with black clothes and earpieces, cueing the bridesmaids and the organ and cutting away to commercial during the slower sections. In reality, it's a bunch of people with 15 minutes of rudimentary training (which was followed by intense boozing) in the nuptial ceremony. Oh, and two or three 10 year old kids who gig as altar boys every weekend but are in that awkward phase of their lives in which they blush and are seemingly unable to answer direly earnest questions from adults who are about to make complete jackasses of themselves in public. There's a priest, too, but he's off in the constabulary or whatever its called anointing himself and whatnot. Also we're in a church the size of a blimp hangar and it was easy to get separated from my entourage. But wth Art and his cool by my side, we wandered into the back to meet Father Hurley and get the show on the road.
After hanging around in our little vestibule off to the side, Father Hurley meandered by the altar and approached the groom closet to let us know that the organ had apparently piped its last breath and that the violent crashing we heard coming from the back of the church was the accompanist trying to free a little Yamaha keyboard and amplifier from a pile of musical equipment that looked to have been deposited there by a glacier centuries ago. I think Art and I simultaneously imagined the guy hunched over one of the little Casio Calculator/Organs we'd both gotten for Christmas 20 years before. It seemed like a hoot, and what could we do, anyway? Ordinarily in these situations, I'd march up and try and fix the thing myself, but I figured now was not the time to be a hero. Moments later, in what I believe will someday be recognized as a miracle, the accompanist emerged from the equipment room, wheeling an enormous Peavey keyboard amp only slightly smaller than the church's pipe organ. It seemed entirely fitting. A passable, synthesized pipe-organ patch sounded and the show was on. I imagined Tricia, hyperventilating.
Art and I mozied out of the groom closet on cue, although Mike's instructions to slink across the church such that we'd arrive at the same time as the bride now seemed dubious. The bridesmaids strolled in, and then Tricia, who looked smashing, but was shaking like a leaf.
It is at this point that I should make a brief aside, on the subject of wedding jitters. During the months preceding our wedding, I had expected that, at some point, I would be wracked with pangs of fear and doubt- the "cold feet" everyone talks about. However, they never materialized. In fact, getting my out-of-town family to the correct church on time gave me more anxiety than the ceremony itself. Tricia says its because I picked the right girl; I give equal or greater credit to the fact that I almost peed myself twice more than a year earlier during the asking-the-parents phase of the operation, which is much, much more frightening.
T, however, was obviously nervous about something (what else is new?), but the trembling subsided after Father Hurley let us sit down. Sitting at the altar is, I think, a remarkably refined idea, particularly given the length of the mass, and I applaud the Catholic Church for their interest in the comfort of the bride and groom to be. As I have no knack for remembering speech, I cannot really recall much of the ceremony itself, other than the standing and the sitting. I think I may have even kneeled once or twice. We did the vows without laughing, which was somewhat difficult because we'd been snickering in typical Tricia and Andy fashion about one thing or another during the entire sermon. Ultimately we managed to maintain our dignity and solemnity and spoke in clear steady voices, until I found myself unable to pronounce the first word in "As long as we both shall live" as anything other than "ath", which I thought made me look pretty sketchy, given the significance of that particular line. I eventually got it out, and we did the kissy part. Then there was communion, where all us blasphemous Protestants got to sit out and were duly noted by God.
Finally, Father Hurley sent us packing, and we marched out front, or rather almost out front, where we set up a quasi-receiving-line, the kind you have when you can't actually say hello and then see your guests out the door on account of the typhoon going on just outside. Also my folks, unaware as I about the whole receiving line business, headed out to the car and Tricia's panicked mother went to chase them down. Ultimately we formed a sort of receiving-cochlea and I said "Hello!" and "Thank you!" so many times that my brain was paralyzed. When someone would ask me a question I'd say "Hello! Thank You!" and feel confused. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had such a fuss made over me, and T was radiant and the world was in love with her. It was great and everyone seemed to forget about the monsoon.
In the car, we re-removed the cork and kicked back. My opinion of limousines at weddings has changed- they are not an ostentatious display, they're an escape capsule filled with booze, and if Vinny is reading this, God bless you. Riding along with us were my little sister and Tricia's younger brother, various members of the wedding party, and a copious supply of legal beverages. My sister was beautiful and I was, as always, indescribably proud of her. She has the poise and confidence of a senator, married a great guy and has the cutest baby ever to crawl. After a short ride, we arrived at the reception spot, a really nice joint by the sea. They sent us into the bridal locker room, which was packed with food and booze and waiters who tripped over themselves to refill your glass. There were children and parents and aunts and uncles and successive salvos of hors d'oeuvres, which we demolished.
Then the pictures began. Oh the pictures.
When we met the photographer, he asked for a list of the various important people who should be photographed, and all the various permutations in which they should be arranged. These critical people would need to be photographed in an hour or so, but they were almost universally unlocatable.
Say you choose two adjoining rooms of any size. In room A, you place a recently married couple, a small bar, a photographer, and 5 to 10 children. Room B contains a much larger bar, individuals carrying trays of finger foods, and all the other wedding guests. Brownian motion does not apply. In fact, all the people-particles will migrate toward room B, because that's where the mini-lambchops and various other meats-on-sticks are contained. Trying to encourage a migration back to room A is challenging because none of its inhabitants are suitable for eating. What's more, the guests in room B are having a tremendous party, and are not particularly interested in saying cheese. In addition, many of them are burly West Virginian men who have no interest in being posed by a wedding photographer. Needless to say, I have newfound respect for these artists. It isn't enough to have a great photographer; the bride and groom have got to be expert hostage negotiators. My advice is to hire an off duty cop to muscle your relatives into room A.
Once the pictures were done, T and I retired to the cocktail lounge, which is where they have the pre-game show known as the "cocktail hour". We arrived just in time to see the party broken up and everyone being herded from the room to prepare for the next phase of the reception, the big introduction. During the months of planning, I had repeatedly expressed reservations about the standard-issue reception-introduction sequence. There's usually some tinkly keyboard music, a cheesy emcee away from his day job at WSUK Great Light Hits, and lots of polite clapping as the wedding entourage makes an entry. Well that's how I pictured it, at least.
Fortunately, I got to pick the band. We'd watched a slew of extraordinarily dorky video-brochures for band after band until spotting one with a living being for a bassist (as opposed to the keyboardist's left hand), a drummer who was not afraid to rock, and a horn section of suitable size and ferocity. Of all the dumb decisions I've ever made in my life, this band was not one of them. These guys were a lean, mean groove machine, and I could tell they meant business this day even before I could see them.
As we queued up in the cocktail lounge for the big entrance, I wondered what the band had planned. I had initially promised to bring them a CD copy of the Theme from Sanford and Son, which seemed like a fantastic piece of music to ease the dorky strain of the entrance. Unfortunately, my Sound Forge skills fell short, and I was unable to extend the track in a natural sounding way. So as the band was loading in, I explained my predicament, and asked them to surprise us and to knock themselves out. Through the thick closed doors in the lounge I heard the opening horn pops of the Blues Brothers, which was perhaps the only piece of music equally suited to the occasion. Without any warning whatsoever, we heard a great muffled roar, the doors were thrown wide by unseen forces, and Peggy and Dennis Murphy were sucked out of the room as if by a vacuum into the black void of the dining room. Banshee-like wailing, flashing lights, and loud rock music erupted from the doorway, like something from a Stephen King novel. Just as quickly, the doors slammed shut and there was a stunned silence in the room, save for the muffled throbbing of a kick drum coming from the door. It was like that scene in Army of Darkness where they throw one of Henry the Red's men into the pit with the monsters.
Then we realized the band had only taken a momentary decrescendo, and were now building up steam for the next frenzy feeding. The heavy doors made it impossible for the next victims to hear their names called, but they put their helmets and harnesses on and prepared for ejection. Moments later, another blast of noise and light and Mr. and Mrs. Campbell were no longer with us. Those of us left in the room silently prayed.
The carnage continued, the ring bearer and flower girl were taken, then the junior and senior bridesmaids and groomsmen were all sucked from the room like pennies into an Electrolux. We heard distinct girlish screams of pain after Groomsman Jonathan McCallister and T's cousin Vikki were taken. Finally, there were four- T, me, and the best man and matron of honor. The mob seemed to be savoring those two; there was an ominous salivatory tone in the muffled mumbling from the microphone. We could faintly hear the word "special", which did not increase anyone's' confidence. The crowd roared for more, the doors and exploded and a tangled web of gripping hands attached to unseen arms twisted through the opening and flung Art Cohenour and Carrie Thomas into the void.
By this point T and I were laughing like idiots. Each ejection had increased the delightful absurdity of the introduction, and after catching a brief glimpse of Art (through the crack in the door now just before us) apparently break dancing and using his pinkies to smooth his eyebrows for the crowd, we were ready for reentry. More mumbling, the rush of air and the clatter of the crash bar and we were moving into the room to a terrific coda of voluminous trumpets and tube-screamer guitar chords. T waved and I blew my best Miss America kiss to the crowd, and we were gently guided on our way to the dance floor, like the pilgrims in that scene at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Our new friend Joe, the bandleader, introduced the Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach tune we'd selected for the dance. There was lots of flashing and awwing and typical Tricia and Andy clumsy dancing, and Joe had the tremendous humanity to invite the rest of the audience to join us, thus slightly concealing the lurching and toe crunching.
The events that followed were typical reception fare, except that with the band rocking like Queen at Wembley there were hardly any asses on chairs until a seemingly endless parade of shrimps and pork chops the size of a man's head (which I had been advising everyone for weeks to select) arrived. A series of screwdrivers quickly erased the trauma of the family photographs and the next several hours were a blur of dancing and wobbling around the room meeting all the guests. The biggest difference between this and other weddings was that any time Joe started talking I had to be sure to slink over to the stage since I might actually needed for something. The cake-cutting went smoothly. There had been a series of hinted threats involving broken legs in the eventuality of harm to Tricia so I opted for the easy fork-to-mouth cake entry pattern and was rewarded with the same. The screwdrivers were magically replenished every time I turned my head, which kept the social juices a' flowin.
I would be amiss if I did not mention the antics of my father, who was the closest thing to John Travolta witnessed at this event. The man never quit dancing. He'd occasionally excuse himself to pant and wipe his brow with a remark about how he was too old for this. Then, moments later he'd pass me going the opposite direction as I walked off the floor, dragging some girl behind him. He discoed, jigged, flatfooted, and heaven knows what else while I was schmoozing at the tables. I'd heard about the legend but never actually witnessed him in action, and it was a site to behold. There may be hope for me, yet. Big John Campbell didn't even make fun of my dancing, this time.
Other highpoints of the evening included Art and Mary Wood's burlesque act involving T's garter, Mike Bailey taking off his shirt (which is becoming a tradition) apparently on a dare from our friend Lira, who did not yet fully appreciate Mike's candor and honesty. The rowdy seating plan was a win- we spent a lot of timing arranging people who we thought would like each other, rather than those who already knew each other, and it appeared to pay off. The band kept playing songs I liked, and in the same Bailey fashion, I kept being surprised and then moments later remembering that we had selected many of the tunes. Groomsman Young John Campbell demonstrated masterful control of a monstrous beer glass during a spirited dance to "Shout". At some point, Art and Joe the bandleader dragged me astage for a power trio rendition of Stevie Ray Vaughan's shuffle "Pride and Joy", which I promptly forgot how to play as soon as the bass player handed me his fantastic 75 P-bass. Art, who later claimed to be so drunk that he could barely remain on his stool, took one of the most fantastic and tasteful solos I have ever heard him produce, and I was so moved that I forgave him for making me tear up during his brief and completely impromptu toast earlier in the evening. Johnathan McCallister made a second, legendary address thanking the Long Islanders for their hospitality and which he concluded with "I know we talk funny, but so do y'all". The man is a genius.
As I summed up in an earlier posting, it was a tremendous time. The band and the food were fantastic, but the crowd was really stellar. Which is great, considering they're the only one we've got. Our future parties hold unlimited promise with such family and friends.
As the band finished up, T continued to beam, but was obviously disappointed that everyone had to leave. The reception staff was in no rush, and had even gone around picking up all the items we'd forgotten in various parts of the building. They were so thorough and helpful that I now know how royalty live, even if it was only for a few hours. Art was abducted by (and would later be kicked off one of the beds onto the floor of the heavily populated Boston Crew's room, where he would later awaken in a tuxedo and with no knowledge of his own whereabouts) Damien Coffey, who goes off in search of bars like a horse headed back to the barn after any event with seemingly endless stamina. Tricia and I piled our things into a car that would take us to our hotel. The friendly Russian driver had trouble with the directions and we drove around for a while, all of us guessing the direction of the highway. We later gave him the monster pork chop the waiters had wrapped for us, since he had been having a long night.
And the rest is history. We're waiting to see the photos, and I'll add some to this post as they're made available.
Stay tuned for the next installment regarding our honeymoon expedition to Utah and Wyoming, which will take a while to write but will hopefully be entertaining :)
I am terribly prone to distraction, and as a result, I am plagued by episodes in which, at some event (particularly solemn or otherwise moving occasions), I start to daydream a little, and then come to. It takes me a moment to figure out where I am. This must have happened at least 10 times Saturday before last- me, standing around a church in my tuxedo, struggling for an instant to remember whose wedding I was at. Then I'd remember and I couldn't help but grin like an idiot for most of the ceremony as a result.
Anyhow I'm getting ahead of myself. I should go back a little.
No solemn occasion is complete without a few small scale disasters.
First, a few days before the ceremony, the best man was scheduled to arrive at an airport on Long Island. In typical Bailey fashion, we eschewed the customary exhaustive exchange of telephone, cellular, and pager numbers, essentially guaranteeing (at least in the case of persons prone to anxiety) that any flight related snafus would escalate into calamity. Art Cohenour does not tend toward anxiety, and thus when we go places or do things together, I bask in his glow of laid-backness, and relax by osmosis. When Art did not arrive at the prescribed time, I worried for a moment, checked the time of the next flight from Cincinnati, and went home. It is precisely what Art would have done for me, and as a result, it worked out perfectly. "Relax", the world seemed to be saying, so I did.
At some point during the interval between those flights, a rain of biblical proportions began that would persist steadily for the next 4 or 5 days. People will tell you that it's good luck to have rain on your wedding day. If that's true, then I'm going to be one lucky bastard. The deluge was such that a small lake formed in the parking lot of the hotel at which most of my out of town relatives stayed. Any birch trees amongst the foliage would have been certain targets. While it did not foil our plans to take Mr. Cohenour into the city that night, it certainly spoiled them, as we spent several hours damp and cold and chasing taxicabs. It was just like being back in Boston.
The next day, members of my family began to arrive in Massapequa. Over the past three years of travel around Boston and New York, I've bumped into precisely zero people that I knew from back home, or even recognized (except for Al Sharpton, who we bumped into near Times Square a while back. What hair that man has.). As a result, the experience of seeing car after car full of familiar but contextually incorrect faces pulling into a Best Western was one of the most surreal experiences in recent memory.
My family, while extraordinarily social, is not terribly exploratory in nature and thus, within minutes there was a family reunion going on in my parent's room but everybody was worried about getting lost driving around town to look for food. It's interesting how many things you notice about your family as a result of discovering things about yourself. I was reminded of my first few trepidations walks from James Welborn's Winter Hill apartment in search of food; James had scarcely a month's worth more clue about Boston than I, but he had his battle wagon and no fear. In keeping with the reunion motif, however, covered dishes magically appeared like loaves and fishes, and there was a lot of TV and eating going on. The Bailey/Cohenour base camp was just like being home.
Later we had a rehearsal. The Catholics have really got the whole wedding thing down to a science. Weeks beforehand, we had checked off boxes below a series of multiple choice questions on a form that allowed modest customization of the wedding. It was basically like ordering a car, only instead of alloy wheel patterns and stereo packages we had selections like Ave Maria vs. Ode to Joy and things about Beatitudes and Colossians and cheesemakers and all kinds of gibberish that I must have missed at Vacation Bible School. Our salesman, Mike, had studied our order form ahead of time, and the instructions he gave sounded so natural and simple that I basically forgot them immediately after he uttered them, which I barely but fortunately recognized as a tremendously bad thing. Sort of like those few rare occasions when I am introduced to someone important and I actually remember to listen to their name as I'm being introduced. Anyhow I didn't want to mess around at any wedding where Italians, particularly ones from the Bronx, are involved so I paid very careful attention to Mike's instructions. They left a little room for artistic license, and that worried me. I was hoping for some written instructions but Mike apparently felt confident enough in the lot of us after 15 minutes or so that we were railroaded out of the church and off in search of the restaurant that we'd booked for the rehearsal dinner.
West Virginians appreciate food like nobody you ever met. We have one, maybe two, Italian restaurants in the state and I was excited to see what the folks were going to make of this little place on Long Island. Things like a pasta course are simply mystifying to us when first encountered. The delightful refractory period between courses is, to us, the epitome of decadence. Delicious non-pink wine flowed freely and it wasn't long until people started inviting each other to their homes for lengthy stays next summer and my father started talking about gun control. Tricia and I had taken careful steps to ensure that the seating would create maximal rowdiness, and we were not disappointed. If the rehearsal dinner was any sort of indicator for the level of excitement we could expect the following night, we were in for a riot.
My entourage (this is perhaps the only time in my life I get to have one, so by god, that's what I'll call them) had designs for a night of boozing, as is more often the case than not for most of them. I was, frankly, beat but I figured, "here I am, making the ultimate leap into wussdome and they're never going to let me get away unscathed." We returned to the hotel to put on our drinking pants but within about 30 seconds the great Arthur Cohenour lay sprawled and snoring and that was the end of the debauchery after the rehearsal dinner.
When I had imagined getting married it was moments like these, more than the actual pageantry and ceremony itself, that engaged my curiosity. What did guys think about while they were trying to go to sleep the night before getting married? Were there strange rituals amongst the groomsmen? Initiation ceremonies? Fear? Trepidation? I watched a little Letterman and fell asleep.
I woke up at 7, and I was hungrier than I have ever been at that hour. Perhaps ancient humans occasionally ate their mates after courtship. I had sausage in mind, though. However, I was paralyzed by laziness, the same sort of laziness that prevents you from getting out of bed early in the morning to pee despite the fact that you'll lay there swollen and uncomfortable for hours. Only in my case I was starving and couldn't bring myself to meander down to the continental breakfast. It was at this point that one of the greatest acts of human kindness, of a father's love for a son, that I have ever witnessed occurred. There was a knock at the door, and waiting outside was my dad, sporting a halo and carrying an armload of Burger King bags full of breakfast sandwiches, chosen in Avery Bailey style- 'give me three or four of everything because I can't make any damn sense of that menu'. That was the second closest time I'd come to tears during the weekend. Art Cohenour immediately regained consciousness in the presence of Crispy Crowns, and we had a feast and shot the shit with dad for a half hour or so. I hope some day I have a son, just so I can bring him a bag of fast food breakfast on his wedding day.
The balance of the morning was spent loafing and later Art and I swam to the strip mall across from our hotel to get a haircut. Members of the entourage questioned the wisdom of my intention to get a 12 dollar haircut just hours before my own wedding, but as a frequenter of 6 dollar haircut establishments, a trip to Supercuts is nearly as exciting as a personal visit from Vidal Sassoon, and anyway it was my last opportunity to have 18 year old girls running their fingers through my hair. Afterwards, elder cousin Dr. Heath Bailey, who always looks after the rest of us pipsqueaks, drove me to Toys R Us for requisition of a gift for our ring bearer. We were leaning toward loud and dangerous, but there were no BB guns or firecrackers of any sort, so we settled for a Nerf blaster. I expected he could have a spot of fun at the reception with it.
Back at the hotel, the groomsmen were delighted to learn that there'd be an honest to god limousine coming to take us to the church. Seconds after boarding, Mike Bailey nearly sent a plastic champagne cork through the roof of the car, nearly giving both himself and our driver Vinny a heart attack and sending us veering. Vinny, after regaining control and immediately sensing of Mike's ability to create disorder, earnestly advised us (after our assurances that the color-cycling neon roof light was undamaged) that certain priests had been known to refuse admittance to those members of wedding parties smelling of sin-juice, and so Mike replaced the cork and the groomsmen got down to the business of giving me a number of gifts procured from area adult novelty shops, whose presence in my pockets during a wedding ceremony would likely be grounds for instant excommunication. I made my best effort to place the items in pockets that I would be unlikely to stick a hand in during the ceremony, and that there were no other even vaguely ring-box shaped packages in Art's possession.
At all weddings I'd attended previously, I'd gotten the distinct impression that somewhere in the church was a man in a headset whispering instructions to a crew in with black clothes and earpieces, cueing the bridesmaids and the organ and cutting away to commercial during the slower sections. In reality, it's a bunch of people with 15 minutes of rudimentary training (which was followed by intense boozing) in the nuptial ceremony. Oh, and two or three 10 year old kids who gig as altar boys every weekend but are in that awkward phase of their lives in which they blush and are seemingly unable to answer direly earnest questions from adults who are about to make complete jackasses of themselves in public. There's a priest, too, but he's off in the constabulary or whatever its called anointing himself and whatnot. Also we're in a church the size of a blimp hangar and it was easy to get separated from my entourage. But wth Art and his cool by my side, we wandered into the back to meet Father Hurley and get the show on the road.
After hanging around in our little vestibule off to the side, Father Hurley meandered by the altar and approached the groom closet to let us know that the organ had apparently piped its last breath and that the violent crashing we heard coming from the back of the church was the accompanist trying to free a little Yamaha keyboard and amplifier from a pile of musical equipment that looked to have been deposited there by a glacier centuries ago. I think Art and I simultaneously imagined the guy hunched over one of the little Casio Calculator/Organs we'd both gotten for Christmas 20 years before. It seemed like a hoot, and what could we do, anyway? Ordinarily in these situations, I'd march up and try and fix the thing myself, but I figured now was not the time to be a hero. Moments later, in what I believe will someday be recognized as a miracle, the accompanist emerged from the equipment room, wheeling an enormous Peavey keyboard amp only slightly smaller than the church's pipe organ. It seemed entirely fitting. A passable, synthesized pipe-organ patch sounded and the show was on. I imagined Tricia, hyperventilating.
Art and I mozied out of the groom closet on cue, although Mike's instructions to slink across the church such that we'd arrive at the same time as the bride now seemed dubious. The bridesmaids strolled in, and then Tricia, who looked smashing, but was shaking like a leaf.
It is at this point that I should make a brief aside, on the subject of wedding jitters. During the months preceding our wedding, I had expected that, at some point, I would be wracked with pangs of fear and doubt- the "cold feet" everyone talks about. However, they never materialized. In fact, getting my out-of-town family to the correct church on time gave me more anxiety than the ceremony itself. Tricia says its because I picked the right girl; I give equal or greater credit to the fact that I almost peed myself twice more than a year earlier during the asking-the-parents phase of the operation, which is much, much more frightening.
T, however, was obviously nervous about something (what else is new?), but the trembling subsided after Father Hurley let us sit down. Sitting at the altar is, I think, a remarkably refined idea, particularly given the length of the mass, and I applaud the Catholic Church for their interest in the comfort of the bride and groom to be. As I have no knack for remembering speech, I cannot really recall much of the ceremony itself, other than the standing and the sitting. I think I may have even kneeled once or twice. We did the vows without laughing, which was somewhat difficult because we'd been snickering in typical Tricia and Andy fashion about one thing or another during the entire sermon. Ultimately we managed to maintain our dignity and solemnity and spoke in clear steady voices, until I found myself unable to pronounce the first word in "As long as we both shall live" as anything other than "ath", which I thought made me look pretty sketchy, given the significance of that particular line. I eventually got it out, and we did the kissy part. Then there was communion, where all us blasphemous Protestants got to sit out and were duly noted by God.
Finally, Father Hurley sent us packing, and we marched out front, or rather almost out front, where we set up a quasi-receiving-line, the kind you have when you can't actually say hello and then see your guests out the door on account of the typhoon going on just outside. Also my folks, unaware as I about the whole receiving line business, headed out to the car and Tricia's panicked mother went to chase them down. Ultimately we formed a sort of receiving-cochlea and I said "Hello!" and "Thank you!" so many times that my brain was paralyzed. When someone would ask me a question I'd say "Hello! Thank You!" and feel confused. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had such a fuss made over me, and T was radiant and the world was in love with her. It was great and everyone seemed to forget about the monsoon.
In the car, we re-removed the cork and kicked back. My opinion of limousines at weddings has changed- they are not an ostentatious display, they're an escape capsule filled with booze, and if Vinny is reading this, God bless you. Riding along with us were my little sister and Tricia's younger brother, various members of the wedding party, and a copious supply of legal beverages. My sister was beautiful and I was, as always, indescribably proud of her. She has the poise and confidence of a senator, married a great guy and has the cutest baby ever to crawl. After a short ride, we arrived at the reception spot, a really nice joint by the sea. They sent us into the bridal locker room, which was packed with food and booze and waiters who tripped over themselves to refill your glass. There were children and parents and aunts and uncles and successive salvos of hors d'oeuvres, which we demolished.
Then the pictures began. Oh the pictures.
When we met the photographer, he asked for a list of the various important people who should be photographed, and all the various permutations in which they should be arranged. These critical people would need to be photographed in an hour or so, but they were almost universally unlocatable.
Say you choose two adjoining rooms of any size. In room A, you place a recently married couple, a small bar, a photographer, and 5 to 10 children. Room B contains a much larger bar, individuals carrying trays of finger foods, and all the other wedding guests. Brownian motion does not apply. In fact, all the people-particles will migrate toward room B, because that's where the mini-lambchops and various other meats-on-sticks are contained. Trying to encourage a migration back to room A is challenging because none of its inhabitants are suitable for eating. What's more, the guests in room B are having a tremendous party, and are not particularly interested in saying cheese. In addition, many of them are burly West Virginian men who have no interest in being posed by a wedding photographer. Needless to say, I have newfound respect for these artists. It isn't enough to have a great photographer; the bride and groom have got to be expert hostage negotiators. My advice is to hire an off duty cop to muscle your relatives into room A.
Once the pictures were done, T and I retired to the cocktail lounge, which is where they have the pre-game show known as the "cocktail hour". We arrived just in time to see the party broken up and everyone being herded from the room to prepare for the next phase of the reception, the big introduction. During the months of planning, I had repeatedly expressed reservations about the standard-issue reception-introduction sequence. There's usually some tinkly keyboard music, a cheesy emcee away from his day job at WSUK Great Light Hits, and lots of polite clapping as the wedding entourage makes an entry. Well that's how I pictured it, at least.
Fortunately, I got to pick the band. We'd watched a slew of extraordinarily dorky video-brochures for band after band until spotting one with a living being for a bassist (as opposed to the keyboardist's left hand), a drummer who was not afraid to rock, and a horn section of suitable size and ferocity. Of all the dumb decisions I've ever made in my life, this band was not one of them. These guys were a lean, mean groove machine, and I could tell they meant business this day even before I could see them.
As we queued up in the cocktail lounge for the big entrance, I wondered what the band had planned. I had initially promised to bring them a CD copy of the Theme from Sanford and Son, which seemed like a fantastic piece of music to ease the dorky strain of the entrance. Unfortunately, my Sound Forge skills fell short, and I was unable to extend the track in a natural sounding way. So as the band was loading in, I explained my predicament, and asked them to surprise us and to knock themselves out. Through the thick closed doors in the lounge I heard the opening horn pops of the Blues Brothers, which was perhaps the only piece of music equally suited to the occasion. Without any warning whatsoever, we heard a great muffled roar, the doors were thrown wide by unseen forces, and Peggy and Dennis Murphy were sucked out of the room as if by a vacuum into the black void of the dining room. Banshee-like wailing, flashing lights, and loud rock music erupted from the doorway, like something from a Stephen King novel. Just as quickly, the doors slammed shut and there was a stunned silence in the room, save for the muffled throbbing of a kick drum coming from the door. It was like that scene in Army of Darkness where they throw one of Henry the Red's men into the pit with the monsters.
Then we realized the band had only taken a momentary decrescendo, and were now building up steam for the next frenzy feeding. The heavy doors made it impossible for the next victims to hear their names called, but they put their helmets and harnesses on and prepared for ejection. Moments later, another blast of noise and light and Mr. and Mrs. Campbell were no longer with us. Those of us left in the room silently prayed.
The carnage continued, the ring bearer and flower girl were taken, then the junior and senior bridesmaids and groomsmen were all sucked from the room like pennies into an Electrolux. We heard distinct girlish screams of pain after Groomsman Jonathan McCallister and T's cousin Vikki were taken. Finally, there were four- T, me, and the best man and matron of honor. The mob seemed to be savoring those two; there was an ominous salivatory tone in the muffled mumbling from the microphone. We could faintly hear the word "special", which did not increase anyone's' confidence. The crowd roared for more, the doors and exploded and a tangled web of gripping hands attached to unseen arms twisted through the opening and flung Art Cohenour and Carrie Thomas into the void.
By this point T and I were laughing like idiots. Each ejection had increased the delightful absurdity of the introduction, and after catching a brief glimpse of Art (through the crack in the door now just before us) apparently break dancing and using his pinkies to smooth his eyebrows for the crowd, we were ready for reentry. More mumbling, the rush of air and the clatter of the crash bar and we were moving into the room to a terrific coda of voluminous trumpets and tube-screamer guitar chords. T waved and I blew my best Miss America kiss to the crowd, and we were gently guided on our way to the dance floor, like the pilgrims in that scene at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Our new friend Joe, the bandleader, introduced the Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach tune we'd selected for the dance. There was lots of flashing and awwing and typical Tricia and Andy clumsy dancing, and Joe had the tremendous humanity to invite the rest of the audience to join us, thus slightly concealing the lurching and toe crunching.
The events that followed were typical reception fare, except that with the band rocking like Queen at Wembley there were hardly any asses on chairs until a seemingly endless parade of shrimps and pork chops the size of a man's head (which I had been advising everyone for weeks to select) arrived. A series of screwdrivers quickly erased the trauma of the family photographs and the next several hours were a blur of dancing and wobbling around the room meeting all the guests. The biggest difference between this and other weddings was that any time Joe started talking I had to be sure to slink over to the stage since I might actually needed for something. The cake-cutting went smoothly. There had been a series of hinted threats involving broken legs in the eventuality of harm to Tricia so I opted for the easy fork-to-mouth cake entry pattern and was rewarded with the same. The screwdrivers were magically replenished every time I turned my head, which kept the social juices a' flowin.
I would be amiss if I did not mention the antics of my father, who was the closest thing to John Travolta witnessed at this event. The man never quit dancing. He'd occasionally excuse himself to pant and wipe his brow with a remark about how he was too old for this. Then, moments later he'd pass me going the opposite direction as I walked off the floor, dragging some girl behind him. He discoed, jigged, flatfooted, and heaven knows what else while I was schmoozing at the tables. I'd heard about the legend but never actually witnessed him in action, and it was a site to behold. There may be hope for me, yet. Big John Campbell didn't even make fun of my dancing, this time.
Other highpoints of the evening included Art and Mary Wood's burlesque act involving T's garter, Mike Bailey taking off his shirt (which is becoming a tradition) apparently on a dare from our friend Lira, who did not yet fully appreciate Mike's candor and honesty. The rowdy seating plan was a win- we spent a lot of timing arranging people who we thought would like each other, rather than those who already knew each other, and it appeared to pay off. The band kept playing songs I liked, and in the same Bailey fashion, I kept being surprised and then moments later remembering that we had selected many of the tunes. Groomsman Young John Campbell demonstrated masterful control of a monstrous beer glass during a spirited dance to "Shout". At some point, Art and Joe the bandleader dragged me astage for a power trio rendition of Stevie Ray Vaughan's shuffle "Pride and Joy", which I promptly forgot how to play as soon as the bass player handed me his fantastic 75 P-bass. Art, who later claimed to be so drunk that he could barely remain on his stool, took one of the most fantastic and tasteful solos I have ever heard him produce, and I was so moved that I forgave him for making me tear up during his brief and completely impromptu toast earlier in the evening. Johnathan McCallister made a second, legendary address thanking the Long Islanders for their hospitality and which he concluded with "I know we talk funny, but so do y'all". The man is a genius.
As I summed up in an earlier posting, it was a tremendous time. The band and the food were fantastic, but the crowd was really stellar. Which is great, considering they're the only one we've got. Our future parties hold unlimited promise with such family and friends.
As the band finished up, T continued to beam, but was obviously disappointed that everyone had to leave. The reception staff was in no rush, and had even gone around picking up all the items we'd forgotten in various parts of the building. They were so thorough and helpful that I now know how royalty live, even if it was only for a few hours. Art was abducted by (and would later be kicked off one of the beds onto the floor of the heavily populated Boston Crew's room, where he would later awaken in a tuxedo and with no knowledge of his own whereabouts) Damien Coffey, who goes off in search of bars like a horse headed back to the barn after any event with seemingly endless stamina. Tricia and I piled our things into a car that would take us to our hotel. The friendly Russian driver had trouble with the directions and we drove around for a while, all of us guessing the direction of the highway. We later gave him the monster pork chop the waiters had wrapped for us, since he had been having a long night.
And the rest is history. We're waiting to see the photos, and I'll add some to this post as they're made available.
Stay tuned for the next installment regarding our honeymoon expedition to Utah and Wyoming, which will take a while to write but will hopefully be entertaining :)
Monday, October 7, 2002
If I saw the sawdust, I wouldn't have died.
If I had been paying attention to Jammer's weblog, I would have known something was afoot, but not that my idiot friends had conspired to teleport my cousin, art (cuisinart), from Richmond KY to Allston, MA, for a guerilla bachelor party at the bar where I was supposed to go drink beer and watch the Marshall game.
I feel bad that welborn had to miss his renaissance fair, but I have a feeling that the teets he saw at the poetry reading we attended over in saugus saturday night beat the pants off (heh) the kind he might seen (or even squeezed) at a renaissance fair.
Speaking of that, its fall. If you have awful road rage, hate crowds, and want to choke screaming kids, you're going to love the Davis Mega Maze. Because I care about you, I'm going to give you the spoiler, and then you can look like Moses when you part the corn and lead your followers out the promised exit. And your hypertension won't flare up. You should have seen me trying to hack my way through the corn walls using one of my sharp keys.
It should be obvious that I am going to be married later this week. I am suprised at what an easy procedure this can be, even if you're having a big fancy wedding (not the meatballs-in-the-church basement kind that I got dragged to as a kid). Initially I was opposed to all the glitz and glamor, but now I firmly believe that the amount of money that Long Islanders spend on weddings is the direct result of having to go to so many of them, and it is worth squandering some of your fortune once if you can count on getting to eat and drink your face off at 10 or 15 other people's blowouts. Anyhow, other than her ceaseless reports about the hissing and scratching on those dreadful internet wedding-themed electric catfights, the bride has been mellow, and the only way you'd know anything was out of the ordinary is by examining our dining room, which is chock full of brightly colored boxes of fascinating-looking kitchen equipment that I am strictly forbidden to use, although I have excercised my manliness a few times and liberated (complete with chest-beating and rambling about how I'm the man in this house and I can open the damned pizza stone if I please) at least a couple of appliances. I don't think I can get away with that again, however. Also once she finds out about this blog, I'm in deep shit.
Also, how is the Marshall Thundering Herd like the Macromedia Corporation? Flash is our bitch!
I feel bad that welborn had to miss his renaissance fair, but I have a feeling that the teets he saw at the poetry reading we attended over in saugus saturday night beat the pants off (heh) the kind he might seen (or even squeezed) at a renaissance fair.
Speaking of that, its fall. If you have awful road rage, hate crowds, and want to choke screaming kids, you're going to love the Davis Mega Maze. Because I care about you, I'm going to give you the spoiler, and then you can look like Moses when you part the corn and lead your followers out the promised exit. And your hypertension won't flare up. You should have seen me trying to hack my way through the corn walls using one of my sharp keys.
It should be obvious that I am going to be married later this week. I am suprised at what an easy procedure this can be, even if you're having a big fancy wedding (not the meatballs-in-the-church basement kind that I got dragged to as a kid). Initially I was opposed to all the glitz and glamor, but now I firmly believe that the amount of money that Long Islanders spend on weddings is the direct result of having to go to so many of them, and it is worth squandering some of your fortune once if you can count on getting to eat and drink your face off at 10 or 15 other people's blowouts. Anyhow, other than her ceaseless reports about the hissing and scratching on those dreadful internet wedding-themed electric catfights, the bride has been mellow, and the only way you'd know anything was out of the ordinary is by examining our dining room, which is chock full of brightly colored boxes of fascinating-looking kitchen equipment that I am strictly forbidden to use, although I have excercised my manliness a few times and liberated (complete with chest-beating and rambling about how I'm the man in this house and I can open the damned pizza stone if I please) at least a couple of appliances. I don't think I can get away with that again, however. Also once she finds out about this blog, I'm in deep shit.
Also, how is the Marshall Thundering Herd like the Macromedia Corporation? Flash is our bitch!
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